Lincoln Square stays true to its unique identity

The vast Welles Park offers year-round recreation in the heart of Lincoln Square. In the summer, the park plays host to the two-day Folk and Roots Festival.

The vast Welles Park offers year-round recreation in the heart of Lincoln Square. In the summer, the park plays host to the two-day Folk and Roots Festival. (Kuni Takahashi/Tribune)

Web BehrensSpecial to the Tribune

When the wave of gentrification sweeps through a neighborhood, it often washes away many of the older elements. But when those tides began to lap at the shores of Lincoln Square about 10 years ago, the residents, business owners and officials didn't allow its streets to be transformed beyond recognition. Nobody here wanted to lose the distinctive character and become another Clybourn corridor, dotted with chain stores.

For much of the 20th Century, this nook of the 47th Ward was best known as the unassuming home to a large German immigrant population. It had long enjoyed significant amenities—a huge library, a large park, its own cinema—but was still considered by many to be a distant outpost of the Brown Line (then called "the Ravenswood L"). Although it's gentrified, Lincoln Square today manages to be both quaint and hip, quiet and lively—and still in possession of a unique identity.

"We have very few chain stores," observes Melissa Flynn, executive director of the Lincoln Square Chamber of Commerce. "That's what makes things interesting here, and that's why it's a destination. I don't know if people would come here if we had a ton of chain stores, because then it might be just as easy to go to Old Orchard or go downtown. It's important to keep that independent feel."

In addition to a variety of locally owned businesses, Lincoln Square brims with culture and recreation. Stretching along Montrose Avenue between Western and Lincoln, Welles Park accommodates everything from football and baseball to bocce ball and horseshoes, not to mention the Folk and Roots Festival, a two-day music and dance extravaganza every summer. Across from the park on Lincoln Avenue is the massive Sulzer Library, the biggest branch library on the North Side. Half a block further north is the Old Town School of Folk Music; most people credit that institution's arrival in autumn 1998 with kick-starting the neighborhood's transformation. Indeed, the Old Town School brought an influx of newcomers arriving to take classes and enjoy concerts, which in turn fueled a migration of new residents, entrepreneurs and other arts organizations.

One of the newcomers was Flynn, who discovered the area seven years ago when she worked for Fleet Feet Sports, which had just opened a store across from the Old Town School. She and her husband were also looking for a home, but "we wanted to be able to park. We didn't want quite the hustle and bustle of Lincoln Park," she says. "We wanted to stay in the city but still feel like we could eventually raise a family." They found their answer in Lincoln Square.

Her reasons for moving here aren't dissimilar to those of longtime resident Jeanne Uzdawinis, who arrived 30 years ago into a neighborhood she still calls "Ravenswood" and describes as being "very sleepy, very German." She and her husband bought a three-flat with two other families, each taking one floor. "I'd never been in this neighborhood in my life," she says. "We came here because it was affordable."

Soon after she moved, the embryonic stages of the current transformation began with an infrastructure project: The city turned a single block of diagonal Lincoln Avenue into a one-way street, with traffic heading south from Lawrence to Leland. At its midway point, where Giddings Street had intersected Lincoln, Giddings became a cul-de-sac, thereby creating a cozy pedestrian plaza. At the Lawrence and Leland endpoints, the city erected unassuming brown pillars that dubbed the strip "Lincoln Square" in simple orange letters. (When the gentrification wave arrived, real estate agents would co-opt that name to rebrand the neighborhood.)

"At the time, it seemed nice," Uzdawinis recalls, "but everyone was mad that their two-way traffic was taken away." Giddings Plaza didn't attract much foot traffic then, but that didn't deter Uzdawinis and Birgit Kobayashi from opening a tiny bakery and espresso shop, Café Selmarie, in 1983. Today, thanks to an ambitious expansion nine years ago, Selmarie is one of the neighborhood's destination restaurants, anchoring the square and providing an outdoor café on the plaza during warm months. Indeed, the entire neighborhood has become a destination—a boon to many small-business owners, but a challenge to those looking to buy homes here: the affordable housing that lured so many in the late 20th Century is largely a thing of the past.

"Things had appreciated irrationally," says Ellen Webber, a real estate agent with Koenig & Strey's West Lincoln Park office who just sold her Lincoln Square house in June after living there for 11 years. Thanks in part to a significant amount of upscale new construction ("A lot of McMansions in the area that go for $1.3 [million] to $1.7 million," Webber notes), her "nice but modest home," a frame house built in 1889, sold for more than $800,000.

Though she still thinks it's "a fantastic neighborhood," Webber says, "Most of the clients I work with just couldn't touch anything there. They were both working, making decent money, but it was impossible to afford a home there. There was something not right about that." She adds that, given the recent economic downturn, some of that inflation should be easing up. "Prices have softened. Nobody's jumping quickly to buy things at a price that would've sold a year ago."

Although gentrification brings its blessings, "It's always a concern as to how it's going to continue," says Flynn. Some Chamber members, she notes, saw their property taxes increase substantially during the last reassessment.

Uzdawinis worries that the environment could eventually squeeze out small businesses that created Lincoln Square. "We're not Lincoln Park—yet," she says. "I see Cold Stone Creamery. I see Payless. I see Starbucks. . . . That is an indicator. It's an inevitable thing when you have a desirable neighborhood with successful businesses."

Resident Deborah Maris Lader remains optimistic that Lincoln Square will continue to evolve while maintaining a healthy desire to support its own. "In this neighborhood, when people say 'shop local,' you can really do that," she says. "There's a bookstore. There are, of course, plenty of restaurants. You can get great artwork.You can take a music lesson."

Lader is the director of the Chicago Printmakers Collaborative, which provides studio space for visual artists and classes for nascent ones. Ten years ago, encouraged by the then-director of the Old Town School, she relocated the Collaborative here from Ukrainian Village; soon afterwards, she and her family moved here too. She says she's "a big booster" of the neighborhood for multiple reasons, speaking as a creative person, a business person and as a parent.

"I'm a musician and an artist—how many musicians and artists can say they love their gentrified neighborhood? But it's OK," Maris says. "We still have our little funky stores. . . .And I can send my kid out into the Square with his friends, and everywhere he goes, somebody's going to know him. If something happens, there's somebody there who's keeping an eye out. Everybody very much cares about this neighborhood."